The Downside
Certain
performance issues, such as viewing angle, screen uniformity and motion
blur, are common to LCD HDTVs. To address the viewing-angle issue, LG
uses the new Super In-Plane Switching LCD technology in the 2006 LCDs.
This is the second Super IPS LCD I’ve looked at, and it has the same
interesting dichotomy. The technology does create a much wider viewing
angle with normal to brightly lit scenes; however, with darker scenes,
the picture loses saturation even 45 degrees off-axis, and parts of the
screen look purple at that angle. I could also see a bit of light spill
around the screen’s edges, where the LCD’s backlight makes itself
known.

Motion blur is evident during faster-moving
scenes. In Chapter Seven of the “HDTV Calibration Wizard” DVD, a white
cue ball rolls quickly across a pool table. With this TV, the ball’s
shape is more oblong than round, as a white blur trails behind the
ball. Likewise, in my 720p NBA demo, the detail that allowed me to make
out the faces in the background vanished whenever the camera panned
across the arena.

I
like my digital displays to look as un-digital as possible; I don’t
want to see pixilation or shimmering in solid colors and grays. This
often occurs because a TV doesn’t have the dynamic range to smoothly
render every step from white to black. The 42LB1DR’s image isn’t as
noisy as some LCDs I’ve reviewed, but it doesn’t render deeper colors
and grays as cleanly as I’d like. In Chapter 10 of “Ladder 49” (Buena
Vista Home Entertainment), our hero Jack moves through a dark, smoky
room as he tries to rescue a young girl. The smoke hangs a layer of
gray over the entire image. With this TV, some areas within the smoke
looked more like digital pixels than actual smoke. The same was true
with the solid red seat in Chapter Eight of “Kill Bill.” I found that
the image was slightly smoother through the component video input than
through HDMI, and turning on the XD Noise feature helps a little. HDTV
signals through the RF inputs had even less noise.

Lastly,
there’s the small matter of deinterlacing. Through the HDMI input, the
42LB1DR did a fine job of deinterlacing a 1080i signal from my Sony
DVP-NS75H DVD player, picking up the 3:2 sequence in the “Video
Essentials” Snell & Wilcox test and cleanly rendering the flyover
of the Coliseum in Chapter 12 of “Gladiator.” I can’t say the same for
the component video input; when displaying a 480i image from my Onkyo
DV-CP802 player, the TV did a very poor job deinterlacing the
“Gladiator” scene, creating a ton of jaggies and stair-stepping
artifacts. This is ironic because, of the two inputs, the component
input is the one with a setting to turn on 3:2 detection with 480i
content, but the setting doesn’t appear to do anything. If you choose
to use the component video inputs for your DVD watching, you will
definitely need a good progressive-scan DVD player.

Conclusion
Despite a few shortcomings in the performance arena, the 42LB1DR has a
lot going for it. It renders a generally good picture, the unit itself
is attractively styled and well built, it has plenty of inputs to
accommodate current and future sources, it’s easy to set up and use,
and it has the necessary internal tuners to make the most of the DVR.

Remember how I said that DVRs always come at a cost? Well, in this
case, that cost is built into the price of the TV. The MSRP for the
42LB1DR is $3,400. That’s several hundred dollars more than other
big-name LCD HDTVs in the 40- to 42-inch range, and it’s about $1,000
more than plasma HDTVs of the same size. The money you’ll save in DVR
monthly fees or equipment upgrades may balance out the cost over the
life of the TV and there are certainly aesthetic and connection
benefits to having an internal DVR. Whether or not that convenience is
worth the extra money is ultimately up to you.